392 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 16 to October 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As is the norm with this series, I put lots of spoilers in this review. You know what to do.
While waiting an inordinate amount of time for my library to retrieve a dilapidated copy of this book from storage somewhere, I confided to a friend, "I'm GUESSING Snow captures her and sends her to an even bigger! even badder! even hungrier! game." Thankfully, this was not to be. I was amused by what we got instead, with Katniss, televised star of a propaganda reality show buttressing a dystopian tyranny, getting forcibly recruited to star in a televised propaganda reality show (of sorts) to stimulate the rebellion. I was also a fan of the rebellion being a bunch of tyrannical jerks themselves, just waiting for the other shoe to drop so they could do unto their enemies as they were done unto. And the ending was strong, thanks to that moral equivalency of the supposed good guys thing, and also moving in a little-sister-gets-incinerated-possibly-thanks-to-your-best-friend sort of way. Yeah, it was a bit heavy-handed, but this is a popcorn book, that's to be expected.
Some of the problems I had with this series, left hanging especially after Catching Fire, were resolved. President Snow isn't a vampire (thank Christ), he's merely an amateur hour Mithridates left suppurating after one too many sips of plausible deniability. The whole idea of District 13 still feels pretty silly to me, but at least they're evil totalitarians in their own right, instead of magical saviors out of nowhere. On the other hand, while I'm glad to learn Panem isn't an acronym (I was thinking "Pan-America," bastardized over generations of language drift), it isn't much of an improvement to learn it's literally a reference to bread and circuses. You don't name your evil empire after your favorite population pacification strategy; that's Scooby Doo level thinking. (Imagine naming America "Fox & Friends.") And I still have a problem with Snow (and now Coin as well) being personified versions of their respective evil empires, in the video game sense that if you take one down, you destroy the evil empire. I prefer my evil empires faceless and bureaucratic, metastasized throughout society and impossible to kill with just one arrow.
Nonetheless, this was an entertaining end to a mostly entertaining series. The biggest stumble was sending the gang back to the Games in Catching Fire, but that's behind us, and I'd say this all wrapped up nicely.
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